The Telecommunication Standardization Sector of the International Telecommunication Union (ITU-T) has provided a Recommendation G.7714 which describes Transport Entity Capability Exchange (TCE) as a process that follows Layer Adjacency Discovery. A carrier protocol state machine is defined for TCE, and some information included in TCE is listed, but the information content of particular TCE exchanges is not addressed in detail. There are plans for ITU-T Recommendation G.7716 (or related recommendations) to specify initialization of ASON systems. Accordingly, it is useful to develop methods and apparatus to manage the information required to initialize links and protocol relationships which may be included in these recommendations.